Bitcoin Forum

What happened::

On June 2, 2020 I gave elmanchez a loan for 0.3 ETH. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5132594.msg54551013#msg54551013)
On June 3, 2020 I gave him another loan for 0.043 BTC. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5132594.msg54556648#msg54556648)

On June 20 I received a message from elmanchez (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2553198) through telegram informing me that he will pay back the loans in time.  I have not communicated directly to him since then.  Shortly after that elmanchez deleted the telegram account he used in our communications.

Since then, the user account "elmanchez" has been associated with a banned user, suspected of attempting to use a banned account to feign trust as an established member, and suspected of selling Bitcointalk.org accounts.  After this revelation, on July 20, 2020 I sent elmanchez a personal message here on the forum asking him for clarification about the loans.  To this date I have not received a reply, and yet I believe he has been active using other accounts.  

At this point I am of the belief that elmanchez has no intention of paying back the loans.

 
Scammers Profile Link:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2553198


Reference Link:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5132594.msg54551013#msg54551013
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5132594.msg54556648#msg54556648
[Archive (https://archive.md/ctBvS)]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5263184.msg54835208#msg54835208


Amount Scammed:

0.3 ETH
0.043 BTC


Payment Method & Proof of Payment:

ETH:
0x2e22b87af9f9131ad16630c23e560872fd2e527b3d85578dded046a8917da33e (https://etherscan.io/tx/0x2e22b87af9f9131ad16630c23e560872fd2e527b3d85578dded046a8917da33e)

BTC:
ddb42b114ced565508b5e6b8fc576c113005314542dcafcde68193716089606f (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/ddb42b114ced565508b5e6b8fc576c113005314542dcafcde68193716089606f)
7868574e8f998cde58d6d0773b6b371fba3d2a9a4036edd31bec99598a7adcb3 (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/7868574e8f998cde58d6d0773b6b371fba3d2a9a4036edd31bec99598a7adcb3)


PM/Chat Logs:

https://i.ibb.co/PZn5hcf/Untitled-1.png (https://i.ibb.co/PZn5hcf/Untitled-1.png) https://i.ibb.co/s6zDJ0t/Untitled-2.png (https://i.ibb.co/s6zDJ0t/Untitled-2.png)  https://i.ibb.co/CmGhdq8/Untitled-3.png (https://i.ibb.co/CmGhdq8/Untitled-3.png)


Additional Notes:

Type 3 Flag link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;flag=2163

Sorry to hear that bro! Flag supported and left a negative feedback. This is unacceptable. No one can recover your lose and I hope this is not a big amount for you.

His account has no reputation left so most possibly he is not coming back anymore.

No kids are going to starve, but any loss is painful nonetheless.  Unfortunately my lending activities are at a net negative as a result of one big loss, and now this one just makes it even harder to recover.

Sorry about this buddy, seems like a real lowlife, imagining being so desperately poor you’re willing to scam & lose your account over that much money, fucking loser. The joke’s on him, hopefully he spends it on hookers & cocaine & dies of a heart attack or gets AIDS.

How about getting Corona and listen to Trump for a whole night LOL

Sorry about the jokes, @DireWolfM14 this no collateral lending business is very risky now a days. I hope you move on and find few good clients to recover your lose in the business.

sorry for your loss. you easily trust to give loans, you have been a victim many times already.
elmanchez has so much troubles in the past where he always encounter some disputes and scam accusation. the previous ones were not really very clear sign but this time it could be it. if a person has kind of brush with scams, you might wanna wait til he regains trust from other users.

Yeah, the amount he scammed is worth way more than the value of his account so I'd agree this is most likely an exit scam. 

That account wasn't that old, nor was he exactly a trusted member.  I'm sure he's not regretting the fact that the account is now all but useless.  In any case, I seriously doubt scammers weigh the costs like we do after they've committed a scam--my guess is that most scammers on bitcointalk have multiple accounts anyway.

DireWolfM14, I'm not trying to pour salt in your wounds here, but why didn't you get any collateral from this idiot?  I know you've been around long enough to know that no-collateral crypto loans between complete strangers on the internet are as risky as loans can get.

Believe me, I'm salty enough a little more is hardly noticeable.  I feel like an idiot myself.

I am sure you learned the lesson.

Elmanchez reached me out in PM multiple times earlier to remove my neutral rating regarding his earlier loan repayment issues. I was feeling suspicious since then. Anyway will support the flag and add the rating unless resolved.

He made a couple of ridiculous borrowing attempts:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5196718
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5206544

But then apparently figured out that requesting a loan like that attracts too much scrutiny, whereas chatting with a lender directly he can impart the con(fidence) more successfully.

So sorry brother, these loan defaulters are really eating up your capital.  :'(
Pay attention to low ranking accounts that are less than 2 years old here and seem to be applying for loans very frequently. I think they do it to first build trust while planning to pull of an exit scam.

I can't recall who had left but there was negative feedback on his profile at the beginning due to unreasonable loan requests. But we must say, elmanchez is a very clever person who knows how to manage people. He gained trust very fast and skip very fast as well. For lenders, it's become more difficult to spot the likely scammer. Hope OP will avoid such as borrower in the future and get a lesson from this story.

Sorry for your loss.

In the second topic, I was surprised TMAN gave the Newbie a loan: https://loyce.club/archive/details/topic_5206544.html

That happened 2 days before TMAN started TMAN's Services Bitches.. You want to be seen? TMAN is keen. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5207070.0).
From TMAN's feedback (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=2553198) on elmanchez:
It looks like he wasn't paid back in Bitcoin, but in services provided. I saw that topic back then, but didn't remember who started it. Now it's starting to make sense :(

Flag supported.

Is this the guy who offer free logo and banner design, I have seen some of this design not really bad but his talents of scamming people is better than creating logo and banner, oh I get it he will tried to gain a lot of trust but once he gain trust he will scam people, he is a scammer clothed in a designer skin.

He was a clear feedback farmer from the beginning if I can remember correctly. The problem with us is we have way more of DT member these days and as a result it's easy for someone to gain positive feedback by impersonating a genuine guy which later they take advantage by scamming other people. We have seen such cases a lot of time but we are yet to learn.
Sorry OP, I didn't mean to hurt you. But that's the reality. The feedback these days almost mean nothing other than some random comments. You should have worked with collateral only loan. Hope you will recover the loss soon.

Ops, Another loan default. I have confused about this loans when DireWolfM14 told here  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5263184.msg54835717#msg54835717) that there are two active loans to elmanchez. And now I am seeing this. Really very sad news for DireWolfM14.
I was also confused that elmanchez is lying when I got a pm by the user about a month ago maybe. I was trying to clear it that something suspicious about elmanchez  here  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5256818.msg54669542#msg54669542). But I did not get enough response from others due to (telegram message).

btw thanks flag is supported.

The problem isn't really from the number of DT members but how the trust system is viewed and handled. I personally rarely give positive feedbacks except after multiple interactions with the said user overtime and I would only give out as much as I can manage at a time, to be able to review changes in the account easily.
Every member should also get involved in the trust system as anyone can leave a feedback which would be visible on the trust page even if it's not on the user's profile information.

Also, trust feedback should only be viewed as a suggestion from other users and everyone should do their own personal research before dealing with any user.
@DireWolfM14 is usually very good in discerning users to give no-collateral loans to. Flag supported.

Positive feedback should be given only if the user is unlikely to scam. Obviously there is some room for opinion here but for example in trading I think you shouldn't give positive feedback to someone whom you didn't risk money with. If you make a 100 trades with Alice but Alice always goes first (i.e. your money/property/etc is never at risk) then you probably can't be sure if Alice would scam or not. Same with escrows, loans with collateral, etc. Those should not result in positive feedback.

But again, it's not always quite that simple. A determined long con scammer will figure out a way to farm trust. Example: shasan's trust rating for elmanchez. No-collateral loan, so shasan was risking money, trust feedback seems justified - shasan might genuinely have thought that elmanchez is unlikely to scam.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=2553198;dt

https://meem.link/i/a/Fco4Cs.jpg
Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image

Shortly thereafter elmanchez takes a loan from the OP, likely with an intent to scam.

I can understand the purpose of this. Although, there could be some variations depending on the interaction before the trade, if someone insists on going first during a trade then they passed up an opportunity to potentially scam willingly and this could prove trustworthiness.

In such situations traders should only risk as much as they feel the user would not be willing to lose their account over at that time. So a long con scammer should not be giving an amount potentially higher than their collateral, if the collateral in this case is a forum account it's more difficult to calculate, but judging by how much effort and time a user has put in, a figure can be calculated (the lowest possible amount preferably).
Users should also not be trusted while they have a pending trade so they can't accumulate funds.

Scammers are crafty. They can do that on purpose to farm trust. Similarly they can say "I take PayPal" or "escrow available" to make it seem like it's a no-risk transaction and then sweet-talk the victim into a risky no-escrow crypto-only deal.

Granted if someone has been around long enough to make 100 deals they can probably be trusted with small amounts. Most of the time you can see who is genuinely engaged in trading and who is only building up reputation.

Most probably last month someone gave me a PM and told me that he got scammed by "elmanchez" but due to lack of time i advised him to keep patience and follow community users guidelines. At that time he sent me his thread link which was opened against "elmanchez". Although case was solved and the user get agree with others who replied on his thread. At last he defaulted loan and its really expected to see someone turned into scammer from regular loan borrower.  

Flag supported and tagged from my end.

Yeah you are right.Its the way by which some users build their reputation and keep taking loans from lenders. I am not saying that everyone who are taking loans regularly have similar plans to default the loan after getting a big amount but most loan defaulters built the trust level first and run away with some good amount.  

Great. He fooled me in sending 0.006 btc a few months ago. Aswell with other western union I have sent when hr had nowhere to stay ;).

The last time I had a convo with this guy is way back early this year. At first, he was asking me to lend him some BTC (because I won a contest that day). Instead of lending, I donated it instead as my heartfelt gesture.

Then he likes to make a free logo for me, and I said okay. However, he didn't fulfill it after days of waiting, so I didn't mind though. That's the last time I talked to him and nothing more.

At first, I thought he was a good guy because of his good trust record without any problem at all (that was back then). But now it seems he finally unleashed his dark side and decides to become the bad guy. Sorry for those who were exit scammed by him.

Now it's clear to me that we should not trust people who ask for several loans in quick succession. An honest person would ask once or twice, and if rejected, go about their day.


The problem with doing that is it will take a long time to accumulate the lost money back by giving and repaying loans because of the small commission fee earned. It's a large amount of money he has to earn back and he already lost close to 0.4BTC from this and theyoungmillionare defaults.

I've just come across this thread and I'm sorry if this has already been asked: Why did you give elmanchez DT the same week they took out this loan with you?


https://loyce.club/trust/2020-06-06_Sat_05.05h/2003859.html
https://loyce.club/trust/2020-06-06_Sat_05.05h/2553198.html


Flag supported & negative trust feedback given.

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See also: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5207013.0

I recently removed elmanchez from my trust list now. I totally forgot to remove it earlier because I thought back then (just like what everyone thinks) he was a good guy with decent trust rating after I donated (instead of lending) some BTC to him as heartfelt gesture for him to “pay off” his loan or dues, until this elmanchez exit scam was posted.

As I remembered about my last conversation with elmanchez, he claims that he was from Russia (correct me if I’m wrong later on).

I've just noticed that elmanchez very graciously added the text "away" to their profile before flying the coup:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob29aa3df7692998c1.jpeg

Somehow I don't think they'll be back.

He is offering a banner and logo design I'm sure he will be back doing the same thing earning trust from his free offer then asking for loan when he already has a good trust rating this happen to those who default their loan.

He's gonna be back again without warning, this time with new identity or so to scam more people. I don't know when will that gonna happen, but I had a gut feeling that he's going to strike "silently".

Maybe right now, he is in brainstorming mode about new ideas to scam more people without easily getting caught. Internet's a big place man. He might use different IPs or so. If only we knew about his real identity, we should contact the local authorities to have him apprehended before he would scam more victims elsewhere.


He even offered me the same thing because I donated some BTC to him back then last year, but didn't fulfill it until I was completely ignored.

I also remembered back then that he was "begging" me to merit some of his posts, but I didn't because it's not the right thing to do.

Who would forget this guy. He offered free design and in fact his the one who designed this avatar hat used by many BestChange Participants.

When I encountered him and asked for free logo and avatar he never attempt to ask for payment so I was shocked about his cases posted about scam. When I read couple of accusation to him at first I thought maybe its not true or he just got framed but unfortunately until this thread of OP came out then thats it. He really intentionally did this!

Sorry for your loss OP.  I do hope most lenders be strict to those who always applied for loan especially big amounts cause we never know when some guys only using reputation as bait to get huge fund then exit.

Some scammers are so canning. They come up with ways of gaining trust from community members by offering free or legit services at first before pulling off an exit scam  or Loan defaulting. This kind of trend is becoming more and more common lately.

Fuck me man, Sorry to see another one on your list.
This time though I actually have some info as I made a trade through PP with elmanchez not long before they made their exit. This is assuming the account isn't a fraud as well, it might be helpful. I'll check it out again and PM you the details.